In any communications system, a first party has the ability to contact and communicate with a second party. For example, a calling party has the ability to communicate by placing a voice call to a called party. Similarly, an emailing party has the ability to send an email message to someone else, a text-messaging party has the ability to send a text message to someone else, and so forth.
Each communicating party has the ability to provide alternative treatment for an incoming call or message, in the event that the party is not there, or is otherwise occupied, to respond to the communication attempt. For example, a called party who is not available to receive an incoming voice call may record ahead of time an outgoing voice message to be played for the far-end party who has called. And an emailed party who is not available to respond to a received email may provide ahead of time an out-of-office message to be sent to the far-end party in response to the received email.
While greeting unification and user of a scheduler or other entries to fill in a generic greeting with dates of absence and other information are known, emergency or black swan events can not only disrupt businesses but also business communications to employees and other business representatives. When a region is impacted severely by a weather event or other significant emergency event, an enterprise or other organization can be confronted with an inability for customers, partners and suppliers to reach their normal contacts (i.e., individual users). While business continuity and recovery plans have provisions for call center and other operations switch-over during such events, this can leave the problem of individual voice mail greetings, email auto-responses, and the like unaddressed. Not all users possess the facts about the outage until after it has occurred and, by then, may not have power or the communications capabilities to be able to appropriately change such greetings and automatic responses.